Use the 'double-3 down' dominoes to make a square so that each side has eight dots.
Amy has a box containing domino pieces but she does not think it is a complete set. She has 24 dominoes in her box and there are 125 spots on them altogether. Which of her domino pieces are missing?
Everthing you have always wanted to do with dominoes! Some of these games are good for practising your mental calculation skills, and some are good for your reasoning skills.
An ordinary set of 28 dominoes can be laid out as a 7 by 4 magic rectangle in which the spots in all the columns total 24 while the spots in all the rows total 42. Try it!
You may like to use the domino set given in the NRICH April 1999 games collection or if you would prefer to use a computer interactivity, you might find our Dominoes Environment useful.
Magic squares can be made with the 25 dominoes remaining when you have put aside (0-5), (0-6) and (1-6). The total of each row, each column and each diagonal is 30. This can be done in many different ways. As a group project you might like to see how many distinct magic domino squares you can find.
Here is part of one layout to get you started.
Can you invent a game involving dominoes and magic squares? If you invent a good game do tell NRICH and we'll publish it on this page.